his hand had entered the account of such of publicly retracting any avowal however a cargo, it would have contracted in his solemn, of any principle however sacred;eyes the stain of innocent blood. To avoid for the reluctant abandonment by Lord that pollution he resigned his place, and Mansfield of a long-cherished judicial erhis means of subsistence, at a period of ror;-and for the recognition of a rule of life when he could no longer hope to find law of such importance, as almost to justify any other lucrative employment. But he the poets and rhetoricians in their subsehad brothers who loved and supported him; quent embellishments of it;-but above all, and his release from the fatigues of a sub- memorable for the magnanimity of the ordinate office left him free to obey the im- prosecutor, who, though poor and dependpulses of his own brave spirit, as the aven- ent, and immersed in the duties of a toilger of the oppressed. some calling, supplied the money, the leisWhile yet a chronicler of gunpowder ure, the perseverance, and the learning, and small arms, a negro, abandoned to dis- required for this great controversy-who, ease, had asked of him alms. Silver and wholly forgetting himself in his object, had gold he had none, but such as he had he studiously concealed his connection with it, gave him. He procured for the poor suf- lest, perchance, a name so lowly should ferer medical aid, and watched over him prejudice a cause so momentous-who, dewith affectionate care until his health was nying himself even the indulgence of atrestored. The patient, once more become tending the argument he had provoked, had sleek and strong, was an object on which circulated his own researches in the name, Barbadian eyes could not look without cu- and as the work, of a plagiarist who had pidity; and one Lisle, his former master, republished them-and who, mean as was brought an action against Granville Sharpe his education, and humble as were his purfor the illegal detention of his slave. suits, had proved his superiority as a JuThree of the infallible doctors of the Church rist, on one main branch of the law of Engat Westminster-Yorke, Talbot, and Mans-land, to some of the most illustrious Judgfield-favored the claim; and Blackstone, es by whom that law had been administhe great expositor of her traditions, has-tered. tened, at their bidding, to retract a heresy Never was abolitionist more scathless on this article of the faith into which his than Granville Sharpe by the reproach to uninstructed reason had fallen. Not such which their tribe has been exposed, of in-. the reverence paid by the hard-working clerk to the inward light which God had Vouchsafed to him. He conned his entries, indeed, and transcribed his minutes all day long, just as if nothing had happened; but throughout two successive years he betook himself to his solitary chamber, there, night by night, to explore the original sources of the Law of England, in the hope that so he might be able to correct the authoritative dogmas of Chancellors and Judges. His inquiries closed with the firm conviction that, on this subject at least, these most learned persons were but shallow pretenders to learning. In three successive cases he struggled against them with various and doubtful success; when fortune, or, be it rather said, when Providence, threw in his way the negro Somerset. sensibility to all human sorrows, unless the hair be thick as wool, and the skin as black as ebony. His African clients may indeed have usurped a larger share of his attachment than the others; and of his countless schemes of beneficence, that which he loved the best was the settlement at Sierra Leone of a free colony, to serve as a point-d'appui in the future campaigns against the slave trade. But he may be quoted as an experimental proof of the infinite divisibility of the kindly affections. Much he wrote, and much he labored, to conciliate Great Britain and America; much to promote the diffusion of the Holy Scriptures; much to interpret the prophecies contained in them; much to refute the errors of the Socinians; much to sustain the cause of Grattan and the Irish volunFor the vindication of the freedom of that teers; much to recommend reform in parman, followed a debate, ever memorable in liament; and much, it must be added, (for legal history for the ability with which it what is man in his best estate?) to dissuade was conducted ;-for the first introduction the emancipation of the Catholics. Many to Westminster Hall of Francis Hargrave; also were the benevolent societies which he -for the audacious assertion then made by formed or fostered; and his publications, Dunning, of the maxim, that a new brief who can number? Their common aim will absolve an advocate from the disgrace was to advance the highest interests of man kind: but to none of them, with perhaps of the incidents of his more vigorous days one exception, could the praise either of delineate him so truly. learning or of originality be justly given. For he possessed rather a great soul than a great understanding; and was less admirable for the extent of his resources, than for the earnest affection and the quiet energy with which he employed them. Like all men of that cast of mind, his humor was gay and festive. Among the barges which floated on a summer evening by the villa of Pope, and the chateau of Horace Walpole, none was more constant or more joyous than that in which Granville Sharpe's harp or kettle-drum sustained the flute of one brother, the hautboy of another, and the melodious voices of their sisters. It was a concord of sweet sounds, typical, as it might seem, of the fraternal harmony which blessed their dwelling on the banks of that noble river. Much honest mirth gladdened that affectionate circle, and brother Granville's pencil could produce very passable caricatures when he laid aside his harp, fashioned, as he maintained, in exact imitation of that of the son of Jesse. To complete the resemblance, it was his delight, at the break of day, to sing to it one of the songs of Zion in his chamber-raised by many an intervening staircase far above the Temple gardens, where young students of those times would often pause in their morning stroll, to listen to the not unpleasing cadence, though the voice was broken by age, and the language was to them an unknown tongue. On one of their number he condescended to bestow a regard-the memory of which would still warm the heart, even were it chilled by as many years as had then blanched that venerable head. The one might have passed for the grandson of the other; but they met with mutual pleasure, and conversed with a confidence not unlike that of equals. And yet, at this period, Granville Sharpe was passing into a state which, in a nature less active and benevolent than his, would have been nothing better than dotage. In him it assumed the form of a delirium, so calm, so busy, and giving birth to whims so kind-hearted, as often to remind his young associate of Isaac Walton's saying, that the very dreams of a good man are acceptable to God. To illustrate by examples the state of a mind thus hovering on the confines of wisdom and fatuity, may perhaps suggest the suspicion that the old man's infirmities were contagious; but even at that risk they shall be hazarded, for few William Henry, the last Duke of Gloucester, (who possessed many virtues, and even considerable talents, which his feeble talk and manners concealed from his occasional associates,) had a great love for Granville Sharpe; and nothing could be more amiable than the intercourse between them, though the one could never for the moment forget that he was a prince of the blood-royal, and the other never for a moment remembered that he was bred up as a linen-draper's apprentice. Beneath the pompous bearing of the Guelph lay a basis. of genuine humility, and the free carriage of the ex-clerk of Ordnance was but the natural expression of a lowliness unembarrassed by any desire of praise or dread of failure. A little too gracious, perhaps, yet full of benignity, was the aspect and the attitude of the Duke, when, at one of the many philanthropic assemblages held under his presidency, Granville Sharpe (it was no common occurrence) rose, and requested leave to speak. He had, he said, two schemes, which, if recommended by such advocates, must greatly reduce the sum of human misery. To bring to a close the calamities of Sierra Leone, he had prepared a law for introduciug there King Alfred's frank pledge, a sovereign remedy for all such social wounds. At once to diminish the waste of human life in the Peninsula, and to aid the depressed workmen in England, he had devised a project for manufacturing portable woolpacks; under the shelter of which ever-ready intrenchments our troops might, without the least danger to themselves, mow down the ranks of the oppressors of Spain. A politician, as well as a strategist, he sought and obtained an interview with Charles Fox, to whom he had advice of great urgency to give for conducting the affairs of Europe. If the ghost of Burke had appeared to lecture him, Fox could hardly have listened with greater astonishment, as his monitor, by the aid of the Little Horn in Daniel, explained the future policy of Napoleon and of the Czar. "The Little Horn! Mr. Sharpe, at length exclaimed the most amiable of men, what in the name of wonder do you mean by the Little Horn?" "See there," said the dejected interpreter of prophecy to his companion, as they retired from the Foreign Office-"See there the fallacy of reputation! Why, that man passes for a states man; and yet it is evident to me that he had never before so much as heard of the Little Horn!" him the assurance that he had well divined the meaning of one immutable prophecy-the prophecy of a gracious welcome and an eternal reward to those who, discerning the brethren of their Redeemer in the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and the prisoner, should for His sake feed, and shelter, and clothe, and visit, and comfort them. United in the bonds of that Christian charity, though wide as the poles asunder in theological opinions, were Granville Sharpe and William Smith; that other denizen of Clapham who has already crossed our path. He lived as if to show how much of the coarser duties of this busy world may be undertaken by a man of quick sensibility, without impairing the finer sense of the beautiful in nature and in art; and as if to prove how much a man of ardent benevolence may enjoy of this world's happiness, without any steeling of the heart to the wants and the calamities of others. When he had nearly completed fourscore years, he could still gratefully acknowledge that he had no remembrance of any bodily pain or illness; and that of the very numerous family of which he was the head, As his end drew nearer, he became less and less capable of seizing the distinction between the prophecies and the newspapers. It rained as heavily on the 18th of February, 1813, as on the afternoon when Isaac Walton met the future Bishop of Worcester at Bunhill Row, and found in the public-house which gave them shelter, that double blessing of good ale and good discourse which he has so piously commemorated. Not such is the fortune of the young Templar, who, in a storm at least as pitiless, met Granville Sharpe at the later epoch moving down Long Acre as nimbly as ever, with his calm thoughtful countenance raised gently upwards, as was usual with him—as though gazing on some object which it pleased him well to look upon. But his discourse, though delivered in a kind of shower-bath, to which his reverie made him insensible, was as characteristic, if not as wise, as that of the learned Sanderson. "You have heard," he began, "my young friend, of this scandalous proceeding of the Rabbi Ben Mendoli? No? Why, then, read this brief every member still lived to support and to account of it which I have been publishing. About a year ago the Rabbi being then at Damascus, saw a great flame decend, and rest on one of the hills which surround the city. Soon after, he came to Gibraltar. There he discovered how completely that celestial phenomenon verified my interpretation of the words-Arise, the one resenting a too well merited reshine, for thy light is come,' &c.; and now he has the audacity not only to deny that he ever saw such a flame, but to declare that he never pretended to have seen Can you imagine a clearer fulfilment of the predicted blindness and obduracy of Israel before their restoration ?" That great event was to have taken place within a few months, when the still more awful event which happens to all living, removed this aged servant of God and man from the world of shadows to the world of light. To die at the precise moment when the vast prophetic drama was just reaching its sublime catastrophe, was a trial not easily borne, even by a faith so immovable as his. But death had no other sting for him. It awakened his pure spirit from the dreams which peopled it during the decay of his fleshly tabernacle; and if that change revealed to him that he had ill-interpreted many of the hard sentences of old, it gave gladden his old age. And yet, if he had gone mourning all his days, he could scarcely have acquired a more tender pity for the miserable, or have labored more habitually for their relief. It was his ill fortune to provoke the invective of Robert Southey, and the posthumous sneers of Walter Scott proach, the other indulging that hate of Whigs and Whiggery which, in that great mind, was sometimes stronger than the love of justice. The enmity even of such men he, however, might well endure, who possessed, not merely the attachment and confidence of Charles Fox and his followers, but the almost brotherly love of William Wilberforce, of Granville Sharpe, and of Thomas Clarkson. Of all their fellow-laborers, there was none more devoted to their cause, or whom they more entirely trusted. They, indeed, were all to a man homoousians, and he a disciple of Belsham. But they judged that an erroneous opinion respecting the Redeemer's person would not deprive of his gracious approbation, and ought not to exclude from their own affectionate regards, a man in whom they daily saw a transcript, however imperfect, of the Redeemer's mercy and beneficence. Thirty-seven years have rolled away since these men met at Clapham in joy, and ¡ in the church of Westminster, are three thanksgiving, and mutual gratulation, over monuments, to which, in God's appointed the abolition of the African slave-trade. It time, will be added a fourth, to comwas still either the dwelling-place, or the plete the sepulchral honors of those to haunt, of almost every one of the more em- whom our remotest posterity will ascribe inent supporters of that measure; and it the deliverance of mankind from the woes may be that they exulted beyond the mea- of the African slave-trade, and of colonial sure of sober reason in the prospects which slavery. There is a yet more enduring temthat success had opened to them. Time ple, where, engraven by no human hands, has brought to light more than they knew abides a record, to be divulged in its season, or believed of the inveteracy of the evil; of services to that cause, worthy to be comand of the impotency of law in a protract- memorated with those of William Wilbered contest with avarice. But time has force, of Granville Sharpe, of Zachary also ascertained, that throughout the period Macaulay, and of Thomas Clarkson. But assigned for the birth and death of a whole to that goodly fellowship the praise will be generation of mankind, there has been no emphatically given. Thomas Clarkson is proof, or reasonable suspicion, of so much as his own biographer, and pious hands have a single evasion of this law in any one of celebrated the labors of two of his colthe transatlantic British colonies. Time leagues. Of Mr. Macaulay no memorial has shown that to that law we may now con- has been made public, excepting that which fidently ascribe the deliverance of our own has been engraved on his tomb in Westland from this blood-guiltiness for ever. minster Abbey, by some eulogist less skilTime has ascertained that the solemn prac- ful than affectionate. It is no remediless tical assertion then made of the great prin- omission, although it would require talents of ciples of justice, was to be prolific of con- the highest order, to exhibit a distinct and sequences, direct and indirect, of boundless faithful image of a man whose peculiarity it magnitude. Time has enlisted on our side was to conceal as far as possible his interior all the powers and all the suffrages of the life, under the veil of his outward appearearth so that no one any longer attempts ance. That his understanding was proof to erase the brand of murder from the brow against sophistry, and his nerves against of the slave-trader. Above all, time has fear, were, indeed, conclusions to which a shown that, in the extinction of the slave- stranger arrived at the first interview with trade, was involved, by slow but inevitable him. But what might be suggesting that steps, the extinction of the slavery which it expression of countenance, at once so earhad created and sustained. This, also, was nest and so monotonous-by what manner a result of which, as far as human agency is of feelings those gestures, so uniformly firm concerned, the mainsprings are to be found and deliberate, were prompted-whence among that sect to which, having first given the constant traces of fatigue on those overa name, we would now build up a monument. hanging brows, and on that athletic though It is with a trembling hand that we in- ungraceful figure-what might be the charm scribe on that monument the name of which excited among his chosen circle a Zachary Macaulay; for it is not without faith approaching to superstition, and a love some misgiving lest pain should be inflict- rising to enthusiasm, towards a man whose ed on the living, while we pass, however demeanor was so inanimate, if not austere? reverently, over the half-extinguished ashes-it was a riddle of which neither Gall nor of the dead. The bosom shrines, erected Lavater could have found the key. That in remembrance of them, may be yet more intolerably profaned by rude eulogy than by unmerited reproach, and the danger of such profanation is the more imminent when the judgment, though unbiassed by any ties of consanguinity, is not exempt from influences almost as kindly and as powerful. It is, however, an attempt which he who would write the sectarian history of Clapham could not wholly decline, without an error like that of omitting the name of Grotius in a sectarian history of the Armenians. A few paces separate from each other, much was passing within, which that ineloquent tongue and those taciturn features could not utter; that nature had compensated her other bounties by refusing him the means of a ready interchange of thought; and that he had won, without knowing how to court, the attachment of all who approached him closely-these were discoveries which the most casual acquaintance might make, but which they whom he honored with his intimacy, and they alone, could explain. To them he appeared a man possessed by He pursued the contest to the end, though oppressed by such pains of body as strained to their utmost tension the self-sustaining powers of the soul. He devoted himself to the severest toil, amidst allurements to luxuriate in the delights of domestic and social intercourse, such as few indeed can have encountered. He silently permitted some to usurp his hardly-earned honors, one idea, and animated by one master passion-an idea so comprehensive, as to impart a profound interest to all which indicated its influence over him-a passion so benevolent, that the coldest heart could not withhold some sympathy from him who was the subject of it. Trained in the hardy habits of Scotland in ancient times, he had received from his father much instruction in theology, with some Latin and a little that no selfish controversy might desecrate Greek, when not employed in cultivating his father's glebe at Cardross, on the northern bank of Clyde. While yet a boy, he had watched as the iron entered into the soul of the slaves, whose labors he was sent to superintend in Jamaica; and abandoning with abhorrence a pursuit which had promised him early wealth and distinction, he pondered the question-How shall the earth be delivered from this curse? Turning to Sierra Leone, he braved for many years that deadly climate, that he might aid in the erection and in the defence of what was then the one city of refuge for the Negro race; and as he saw the slave-trade crushing to the dust the adjacent tribes of Africa, he again pondered the questionHow shall the earth be delivered from this curse? That God had called him into being to wage war with this gigantic evil, became his immutable conviction. During forty successive years, he was ever burdened with this thought. It was the subject of his visions by day, and of his dreams by night. To give them reality, he labored as men labor for the honors of a profession, or for the subsistence of their children. The rising sun ever found him at his task. He went abroad but to advance it. His commerce, his studies, his friendships, his controversies, even his discourse in the bosom of his family, were all bent to the promotion of it. He edited voluminous periodical works; but whether theology, literature, or politics were the text, the design was still the same to train the public mind to a detestation of the slave-trade and slavery. He attached himself to most of the religious and philanthropic societies of the age, that he might enlist them as associates, more or less declared, in his holy war. To multiply such allies, he called into existence one great association, and contributed largely to the establishment of another. In that service he sacrificed all that man may lawfully sacrifice-health, fortune, repose, favor, and celebrity. He died a poor man, though wealth was within his reach. their common cause. lle made no effort to obtain the praises of the world, though he had talents to command, and a temper peculiarly disposed to enjoy them. He drew on himself the poisoned shafts of calumny; and while feeling their sting as generous spirits alone can feel it, never turned a single step aside from his path to propitiate or to crush the slanderers. They have long since fallen, or are scon to fall, into unhonored graves. His memory will be ever dear to those who hate injustice and revere the unostentatious consecration of a long life to the deliverance of the oppressed. It will be especially dear to the few who closely observed, and who can yet remember how that self-devotion became the poetical element of a mind not naturally imaginative; what deep significance it imparted to an aspect and a demeanor not otherwise impressive; what energy to a temper, which, if not so excited, might perhaps have been phlegmatic; what unity of design to a mind constitutionally discursive; and what dignity even to phys ical languor and suffering, contracted in such a service. They never can forget that the most implacable enemy of the tyrants of the plantation and the slave-ship, was the most indulgent and generous and constant of friends; that he spurned, as men should spurn, the mere pageantry of life, that he might use, as men should use, the means which life affords of advancing the happiness of mankind; that his earthward affections, active and-all enduring as they were, could yet thrive without the support of human sympathy, because they were sustained by so abiding a sense of the Divine presence, and so absolute a submission to the Divine will, as raised him habitually to that higher region, where the reproach of man could not reach, and the praise of man might not presume to follow him. Although to repeat a mournful acknowledgment, the tent of Thomas Clarkson was pitched elsewhere, yet throughout the slave-trade abolition war, the other chiefs who hailed him as the earliest, and as |